The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Where's Tarski and Gendlin when you need them? Aight fam, spit bars:
So even the most healthy of us are actually living in a "cold, unfeeling universe", and while it's usually an unhelpful stance from a doctor or would be shrink, the GMC isn't looking so I'll quietly whisper skill issue, since even the "healthiest" of us live in the same reality and manage just fine. Believe it or not, nowhere in psychiatry textbooks does it state that any kind of delusion, be it intentional or otherwise, is necessary for mental health.
If I die, I die. And that really would suck. Doesn't mean I don't expect radical life extension within my current nominal life expectancy, even if superhuman AGI is a bust. That is the closest I have to an informed opinion on such a pre-paradigmatic matter. Maybe you're already 64 years old, in which case you ought to be a tad less hopeful, but not particularly so, given that we don't seem to be in the timeline where AI doesn't work. 95, like my grandfather?
Then as painful as it is to accept, he's probably going to die before technology and the medical science he pioneered can save him. That is the tragedy of a cold, uncaring universe, but it is a form of pain humans can bear, I am already bearing it, I can't say I've made my peace with it, or that it won't be some of the worst pain I can potentially ever feel when he does pass, but I'll persevere.
In contrast, my own death is at the very minimum at the exact same time, or a long time away. It is not remotely as painful to contemplate as the passage of a man who is both a better doctor and human being than I am. All I can hope for is that he thinks his life was worth it, even if it ends far too soon.
And isn't that a difference between us of degree and not kind? Believe it or not, I don't expect to outlive Heat Death, but the sensible approach to finding yourself in an indifferent and cold universe is to grab it by the Dyson Spheres and then mould it to be full of individual, happy entities that aren't so.
It may be a skill issue, but have you lost a direct family member?
Because I didn’t know I had a skill issue until it happened to me
Also an age issue, and a responsibilities issue. When you're in your 20s you feel invincible and are all "live fast die young leave a beautiful corpse." Death isn't real, it's a thing that happens to other people, not you. When the most you have to care for is a casual gf, who cares if you die? She'll move on. It's very different when you age and see your mortality appear over the horizon, or when there are people who you love deeply would be permanently, fundamentally changed or scarred by your death.
I'm sorry you don't have religion. I am religious, and more than the promise of an afterlife, the idea that life has meaning and that I have a purpose is what comforts me. It's not a perfect solution, of course, and I still feel plenty of doubt and existential dread. But it helps.
Look into Stoicism if you havent already. If I weren't a Christian, I would probably be a stoic. It's a very sensible response to life in a cruel, uncaring world.
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Yes. Ones I loved to boot.
The skill issue in question is handling your own knowledge of your mortality, not that of others.
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